Offseason rules proposals

[alanv25]

A year or two ago, there was some discussion about how an owner could do a lot of research on minor leaguers and post a bid on a prospect, only to lose him to an owner who did no research at all.  There was talk about how we can give more credit to the owners who put the time in doing the research.

My manager at work actually thought of this idea when I was explaining this situation to him, that certain owners in our leagues do a lot of research on minor leaguers and post them on the board, but many times get outbid on them.  So the owner who did no work to discover this prospect gets rewarded with the prospect.

This idea could be used for all free agents, but it also could be narrowed down to just prospects.  The idea is that the owner who posts the first bid on the message board only has to match bids made by other owners.

So if owner 1 posts a bid for $1M, owner 2 would have to beat $1M with his bid.  So let's say that owner 2 bids $1.5M.  Then all that owner 1 would need to do is match owner 2's bid of $1.5M because owner 1 was the one who first posted this player.

For prospects, this would reward the owner who did the research and found the player.  This would give owner 1 the edge in winning that prospect since he did the research and posted this player to the FA board.


I would just make this the rule for all free agents.

Also, this is an easy rule to remember.  Once we see it a few times, it will be in our heads.

I like where you are heading with this Alan.  My thought process on this is adding another thing to your "match bid" to give the original poster/bidder the advantage.  My idea is adding a "poker-betting" style to bidding process as well.  My first thought is to speed up the bidding process significantly and eliminate the ever so popular 200k raises on 1m raises or 1m raises after there was a raise of 10m!
With this raising-requirement it still gives a lot of power to the original bidder and puts the raiser in a position to put their money where their bid is sort to speak!

If someone is not familiar with poker bidding process... The raiser must match or exceed the last bid on the player.  You raise by 1m, the next bid/raise has to be at least 1m.  You raise by 5m the next bid must come in at 5m or more etc.

So what if we combined the two?  Owner who posted only has to match the previous bid.  All other owners must raise by at least the same amount of the latest raise.

As an example:
1- Owner 1 opens bidding at $1M.
2- This means all other owners would need to raise by at least $1M.  Let's say owner 2 raises by $1M (the minimum), making his bid $2M.
At this point, owner 1 can bid $2M (or more) because he posted the 1st bid for this player, but all other owners must raise by at least $1M (the latest raise), so all other owners must bid at least $3M.
3- Then let's say owner 3 decides to raise the bid by $2M, so his total bid is $4M.  (Now the minimum raise is $2M, except for owner 1 who made the original bid.)
4- Then let's say owner 1 matches the latest bid, so he bids $4M
5- Then let's say owner 2 jumps back in and raises by $3M, so his total bid is $7M.  (Now the minimum raise is $3M.)
6- Then, owner 4 raises by $3.5M, so his total bid is $10.5M.  (Now the minimum raise is $3.5M.)
At this point, the owner who made the original bid can bid $10.5M, but all other owners must raise by $3.5M, so any of them must bid at least $14M.
7- Lastly, owner 5 raises by $4M and after 48 hours, wins the player at $14.5M.

This wouldn't be too difficult to remember, I don't think.
A couple of observations is that the longer the bidding goes on, the more of an advantage the owner who made the original bid has, which is what we want.
Also, this method would favor those with more cap room.  In the example above, if I'm sitting with $5.5M cap space, I would still be in it at step 2, but after the owner raised by $2M in step 3 to make the total bid $4M, then with my $5.5M cap space, I'm out.  Under the current system, I could still bid 0.5M or 1.0M, and maybe win the player at $5M.  But in this example, I'd be out because the minimum raise is $2M.  I think this would favor those with more cap space, most of whom would probably be rebuilding.
One possible advantage would be once the bidding gets high, like total bid of $15M, you probably won't see these small raises, like someone raising by $0.5 to make the total bid $15.5M.  By this time, the minimum raise would probably be at least a couple million.

Another method could be:  One thing that I've thought of in the past is owners must increase bids by at least 10%.  This would not be too hard to calculate in our brains.
If the latest bid is $2.0M, then you just move the decimal one place to the left to get the minimum amount that you must raise by.  In this case, you would need to raise by at least $0.2M.
If the latest bid was $5.0M, then the minimum raise would be $0.5M.
If the latest bid was $10.M, then the minimum raise would be $1.0M.
If the latest bid was $20.M, then the minimum raise would be $2.0M.  And so on.
You can see that as the total bids get larger, the minimum raises get larger.
For $50.0M, the minimum raise would be $5.0M.  But the owner who originally posted the player would just need to match the $50.0M.  All other owners would need to bid at least $55.0M.
This would be a little easier to understand and calculate than the 1st example above.